Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes. 

My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures. 

We have a lot of logistics going on this week in the pod. Excited to share each one.

Product of the Week: This product of the week is coming out of Chattanooga founded by Spencer Ware and Patrick Visintainer. The name of the company is called Repowr which is an open B2B marketplace of accessible equipment. 3% of trucking companies own 97% of trailer capacity in this highly fragmented market. This leaves little coordination and almost no connected network of vacancy which produces a large amount of inefficiencies in the market.   Getting a trailer, renting it, and using it should be as easy as opening an application, finding a trailer, paying for it, and gettin’ to hauling. Welcome to Repowr. And trailers are just the trojan horse for the several other equipment verticals in the market. Check out Repowr if you’re in needed of trailer today.     

Question of the Week: This week’s questions of the week is how do you find a co-founder? This past week I was chatting with an entrepreneur who was looking at finding a co-founder as it is one of the most important decisions maybe outside of finding your life partner. Naturally the easiest way is to find them through your existing work experience and relationships. If those primary sources are limited, then focus on your trusted network of individuals who would vouch for someone. Once your individual network is exhausted, now comes the tougher part but there are a few successful ways I’ve seen it done. First, seek to find like minded people. Like minded people in this important instance would be someone else looking to start a company. Timing is always everything especially when it comes to people’s career, so go to events where other entrepreneurs would go to. I’ve heard several occasions where co-founders met at a fire-side chat, Atlanta Startup Village, or Atlanta Startup Convo (the next and last one of the year is on Wednesday). Outside of local events, check out the YC Co-founder Matching platform. This is one of the strongest communities of ambitious people online. Lastly, I have also found Reddit forums and other co-founder forums or websites to have worked in the past but it takes a disciplined process, a scrupulous eye, and significant patience. For those looking to start a company, try some of these strategies and let me know which one worked the best for you. 

Company Coming Up: There are two companies coming up this week. The first is called Jax Rideshare Rentals and was started by Emory MBA graduate, Julius Bryant. While getting his Masters degree, Julius and his co-founder started leasing out cars they purchased to verified drivers so they could drive Uber and Lyft. Today, they continue to empower people who lack vehicle access in Atlanta and Dallas to earn income via the gig economy but instead of purchasing the cars, they are shifting their focus to organizations who already have the cars and now providing the software and verified drivers to turn those sedentary car lots into cash cows. Keep an eye on this product as they continue to scale city by city.  

The second company coming up was started by Georgia Tech Alumnus, Murtaza Bambot and it is called HeartBeat. HeartBeat is the operating system to enhance your community. With their software, any community leader and organizer can host conversations, events, and more. The reason I get excited about HeartBeat is the online YouTube reviews. If you search HeartBeat reviews on YouTube, you’ll find videos of users who walk through the product for 15 minutes, praising the product and how it solves a real need. If you’re looking to put structure and organization around your online community, check out HeartBeat. That is Heartbeat.chat. Keep up the momentum and product love!

Raise a Glass: Lastly, let’s all raise a glass to Saltbox. Tyler Scriven, Maxwell Bonnie, and Paul d’arrigo have created the co-warehousing space. Across the country, Saltbox owns and operates large warehouses where tenants who run e-commerce stores can store, ship, and scale their product offerings without having to sign a long term lease. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses getting their start shipping product from the garage, the next affordable and flexible step is Saltbox. They just raised $35M from Cox Enterprises and Pendulum to enhance their software solution to provide a full suite of services improving the logistics for their customers. Congrats to the entire Saltbox team!    

 Annnnd, that’s 5 minutes.

Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word! 

Resources discussed in this episode:

Product of the Week: Repowr

Question of the Week: How do you find a co-founder?

Company Coming Up:

Jax RideShare Rentals

HeartBeat

Raise a Glass: Saltbox

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